Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Even though I’m sitting at my computer typing this right now, I’m going to pick on you about your computer habits.

You are on it too much.

You’re getting upper back and neck pain from it.

Your posture looks a bit hunchback–like in appearance.

Children are running away from you in the street.

OK, so the last one was a bit of a stretch but all that computering is not doing your upper body mechanics any good.

Unfortunately the world is run by computers, so to simply say stop all computer activity is bordering on the ridiculous.

What I will suggest though is to offset your computer time with some easy to implement training strategies.

If you’ve been to a gym in your life then you will all have performed a rowing exercise of some description. 

By training the upper back muscles you can offset the work of the muscles at the front (chest, shoulders) do while at work, driving etc.

The worse thing a computer head can do is to sit all day at their desk and then head to the gym and do 100 chest exercises.

You're simply feeding your already sub-par posture and making it worse and thus, harder, to get out of.

Weight training cements your posture which is great if you have great alignment because it trains the muscles to be strong enough to hold that new found optimal alignment.

Below is a video of a variety of rowing exercises to include in your training program. 

Be sure to use a lighter weight then you think you should use and hold the contraction point where the weight is right at your chest, for at least 1 second for each rep with 2 seconds being even better, with a very controlled tempo.

You can use bodyweight, cables, free weights or bands for these variations.

Cardio Warm Ups Suck!!

I’ll admit it.

Back in the mid 2000’s when I started in the personal training game, all my programs started with either of these:

5mins Treadmill

5mins Exercise Bike

5mins Cross Trainer

Sadly many people’s programs, and probably yours, still use this warm up protocol but why?

Does the treadmill warm up your bench pressing muscles? 

Does the bike warm up your bicep curling muscles? 

Not really, not even close.

A correctly programmed warm up will be specific, or near specific, to the session about to be completed.

In the studio we take the time at the start of a session to gradually increase body temperature, relax overactive muscles, activate inhibited muscles, improve joint mobility while moving from ground to standing based exercises and then we finish that off with a 2 – 3 minute burst of cardio to get a spike in heart rate.

This ensures that most, if not all, of the body has gone through some sort of range of motion before hitting any working sets.

Often we’ll also program the first exercise to be progressive in weight until a top set is reached, so the warm up is made even more specific to the focus lift of the day.

The warm up should also include any rehab or corrective exercise issues that need to be addressed, which will be highly individual.

That being said below is a video of some stability / mobility exercises that you can include in your warm up to make it more effective: